[geeks] just to stir things up, a few predictions

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

>> VMS has a ton of areas that are definitely better.
>
> Until it ships on a major architecture, hardly anyone will know.

And what would you call VAX (the most successful minicomputer
architecture EVER), AXP (the first 64-bit RISC, and one of the most
widespread RISC at its time), and Itanium?

> Maybe the Itanium port will lead to an AMD64 port.

Why in the hell would they do that?  What would that accomplish other
than puttin  VMS on unreliable commodity hardware so that it's not
nearly so bulletproof.  -That- will sure sell a million more licenses,
right?

Just because you can't run an OS on your desktop doesn't mean that it's
not successful.  And, for that matter, a VAXstation or AlphaStation will
-give- you VMS on your desktop, and you can still buy AlphaStations
new!

<flame>
Hey, here's an idea, let's port VMS to IA32.  All the world's a PC!!
After that, let's port OS/390, too, and everything else unique and
creative so that EVERYONE will know how great it is when we stamp out all
that's unique and creative about it so that it'll run on no-name
Ethernet cards and overclocked motherboards!  We can emulate S/390's
channels with...uh..uh...USB on AMD64!!  Hooray!  I can dual-boot
CICS/MVS and WinXP for g4m3z!!!
</flame>

Much of what makes VMS so insanely great is what makes OS X insanely
great and AIX insanely great: the vendor has very tight control over
what hardware goes into the box.  If you start throwing in third-party
drivers for Realtek Ethernet chips, winmodems, winsoundcards, no-name
nVidia reference boards, and all the other crap that makes PCs to hard
to support, you lose the solid foundation that makes operating systems
like that so attractive.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "I've built my whole system with [-fomit-frame-pointer]
Elgin, TX        (   cause it was recomended...as I don't care if a program
USA               )  crashes, not interested in finding out why."
                  (                     --Tim, Another Satisfied Gentoo User